Cinema: Bacchanalian Bash

Zorba the Greek. A wild wind whirls through an open door. A wild old man strides into a dingy waiting room. His face is like a side of cheese the maggots have been at, but his eyes are bright and piercing. “Hollow cheeks, strong jaw, jutting cheekbones, a large voracious mouth, a living heart, a great brute soul not yet severed from Mother Earth”—this is Zorba the Greek. He strides up to a young man he has never seen before and looks deep into his eves. “I like you,” he announces fiercely. “Take me with you.”

“Why?” the young man answers with a gasp. He is a timid essayist who takes refuge from life in literature.

“Why!” the old man roars with exasperation. “Will no man ever do anything without a reason? For the hell of it, that’s why!”

The hell, the horror, the wonder, the sheer animal delight of it have drawn thousands of readers to a novel called Zorba the Greek, a mad magnificat to man composed by the late Nikos Kazantzakis. This translation of the book into an English-language film might easily have changed the author’s hearty wine of life into cinematic sugar water. Instead, Director Michael Cacoyannis (Electra) has served it up in a grand uproarious Bacchanalian bash.

For the hell of it, as the film begins, the young man (Alan Bates) turns suddenly to the old man (Anthony Quinn) and says yes. “I have a lignite mine in Crete. We can work it together. May God be with us.” Zorba lifts his glass. “God,” he bellows sturdily, “and the Devil!”

Speak of the Devil and he appears. First night in Crete, the old man turns into an old goat and goes snorting after a dilapidated soubrette of 60 (Lila Kedrova), who followed the British fleet to Crete in her flaming youth and made enough money to retire by entertaining admirals on the bridge. Next day the old man urges his young friend to hold similar converse with the village widow (Irene Papas). The young man is afraid to try. “It would only make trouble,” he murmurs. “Trouble!” the old man hoots at him. “Life is trouble. Only dead is not.”

The young man doesn’t have to look far. The morning after his first night with the widow, she is grotesquely murdered by the vengeful villagers. Some clays later, as Zorba’s silly old slut lies dying, bestial peasants burst into her house and strip it while she lies weakly watching, strip it to the walls and leave her there alone with nothing but a bed to die on. And at the climax of the film the mine and all the money the young man has sunk in it go smash in one catastrophic afternoon.

The young man is struck numb with horror; but the old man, though his heart cracks and his eyes weep blood, rises up stronger than ever from every disaster to dance the delirious unremitting dance of life. “Zorba!” the young man cries, “teach me to dance!” The old man rises up, his eyes alight. “You lack madness, my friend,” Zorba says softly. “A man must be a little mad to cut the rope—and be free!” A little mad, the young man begins to dance.

Kazantzakis is the Dostoevsky of the Mediterranean, and Zorba the Greek is his most popular work. Director Cacoyannis treats it with respect but not with awe. The big moments of the book are all in the film, but the fictional furbelows are trimmed, and some dazzling cinematic doodads added. The camera sees much that Kazantzakis didn’t, and the movie is often funnier than the book—Kedrova’s minx emeritus, she of the floor-length eyelashes, frequent chins and raucous reminiscences is, for instance, a major comic creation. Zorba, of course, is the heart and soul of the show, and Quinn plays him to hellangone. In his finest frames, at the dominant moments of the drama, he is the fire of life itself, a piece of the sun in the shape of a man.